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WENDELL PHILLIPS 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 

THE FAITH OF AN 
AMERICAN 

BY 
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 




PRINTED FOR THE 

WOODBERRY SOCIETY 

1912 



COPYRIGHT, 191 2, BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 






£C!.A3122G0 



»i^ 



THIS ADDRESS WAS DELIVERED ON NOVEMBER 29, 1 91 I 
BEFORE THE WOODBERRY SOCIETY AND ITS FRIENDS 
AT ITS FIRST MEETING, IN THE HALL OF THE GROLIER 
CLUB, NEW YORK, TO MARK THE ONE HUNDREDTH 
ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF WENDELL PHILLIPS 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 

THE FAITH OF AN AMERICAN 

I THANK you, Mr. President; and, 
my friends, no words can express the 
pleasure I take in this welcome, nor my 
sense of the honor you have done me. I 
greet the Society at the beginning of its 
career ; and it is a great happiness to find 
myself asked to link with the occasion the 
memory of a man who was to me, and still 
is, one of the masters of my life. 

I want to tell you how it was that Wen- 
dell Phillips came to be, in my eyes, the 
ideal American. Do you realize what it was 
to be a boy in the days of the Civil War.? 
Almost my first clear memory is of the 
family table when one of my older broth- 
ers burst in at the door, crying out," They 
have fired on Sumter!"So deeply was that 
scene imprinted on my eyes that I can 
still see ho w^ every one looked. A few days 
later a tall tree from the old family wood- 



2 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

lot lay Stripped of its branches in the yard, 
like a mast, — our flag-pole; and from it 
the flag floated throughout the war. The 
young soldiers were camped on the com- 
mon where I played, opposite the house; 
and when they went off to war, my father 
made them the farewell speech. I can see, 
as if it were yesterday, the reading of the 
evening newspaper after their first battle, 
for one son of the house, a cousin, was 
with them ; and I can see the letter which 
two years later brought the message of his 
death. I picked lint, as every one did, for 
the wounded after Gettysburg. My earli- 
est literary treasure, which was the file of 
my Sunday-school paper, I sent off' to the 
army for soldiers' reading. I suppose it was 
my dearest possession. I remember the 
early April dawn when I was waked by 
the bells ringing for Lee's surrender, and 
the darker morning of Lincoln's death. I 
recall that the boy who told me the news 
was seated on the arm of a wheelbarrow ; 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 3 

and as I ran home, frightened and awed, 
I saw men crying in the street and heard 
women weeping in the houses, and while 
I was telling my tale, the bells began to 
toll. 

Four years of this. I was but a child, 
but I shared the emotion of a nation. I 
do not think one can overestimate .the 
power of such an experience to permeate 
and, as it were, drench the soul. I beheve 
it gave moral depth to my nature, and 
lodged the principle of devotion to great 
causes in the very beatings of my heart. 
I was born at once, from the first flash of 
my intelligence, into the world of ideas; 
my first emotions were exercised in a na- 
tion's pulses; high instin6ls put forthCiri 
my breast. I was but one of thousands. I 
do not wish to appear singular, or to ex- 
aggerate. This is merely what it was to be 
a boy in those days. But child though I 
was, I feel that I cannot exaggerate the 
passion that was poured along my veins 



4 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

in boyhood; and, as the commotion of the 
strife slowly subsided in the stormy mea- 
sures of the period of reconstru6lion, my 
growing youth was still fed on great and 
impersonal issues of the large world. I 
was a school-boy, but 1 knew more about 
negro rights than Latin grammar, Santo 
Domingo better than the Peloponne- 
sus; and the Franco-Prussian War, which 
broke out in my last school-year, was 
more to me than the entire outlines of 
ancient and modern history. Public inter- 
ests had become the habit of my mind; 
and contemporary events were always 
more interesting to me than my studies. 
My first recolleft ion of hearing Wen- 
dell Phillips is from my college days, 
though of course he was always one of 
my heroes, and I may have heard him be- 
fore, for we were an anti-slavery family. 
A gentleman of uncommon distin6lion 
in look and bearing, talking in an un- 
commonly conversational manner without 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 5 

raising his voice, and with nothing very 
much to say, — that was the impression, 
almost disconcerting to an admirer; one 
was tempted to wish he would wake up 
and show his mettle; but you listened. 
Then the first thing you noticed was that 
people were taking up their hats ; he was 
done. There was no sense that time had 
passed. He bound me with a spell. I cannot 
describe his oratory. I have heard many 
others make addresses ; I never heard any 
other man speak. I measure the intensity 
of the impression he made upon me by the 
fa6l that, while I have very little of what is 
called power of visualization in memory, 
there are certain sentences of his which, 
as I have been lately reading his speeches, 
bring the whole man before me. I hear 
his intonations, I see his attitude, as if his 
voice were still sounding in my ears and 
his form standing before my eyes. "Des- 
potism looks down into the poor man's 
cradle, and knows it can crush resistance 



6 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

and curb ill-will. Democracy sees the bal- 
lot in that baby-hand;" — you saw him 
stand above the cradle; you felt that, in 
comparison with that "baby-hand," the 
sceptres of monarchs were as dust in the 
balances of power. " If these things are so, 
the boy is born who will write the Decline 
and Fall of the American Republic;" — 
I thought that boy was sitting by me in 
the next seat. There was such vividness 
in his eloquence. And, in the old phrase, 
persuasion sat upon his lips. You believed 
what he said while he spoke. I remember 
a friend of mine in Lincoln, Nebraska, a 
gold Democrat, who was his host, relat- 
ing to me in illustration of this the effe6l 
of Phillips's private talk: "Why, Wood- 
berry," he said, "it was two days before 
I got back to my right senses on the cur- 
rency question." I heard him seldom; but 
hearing him thus at intervals and at a dis- 
tance, ripening now to years of manhood, 
not suddenly nor with any intention of 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 7 

my own the spell deepened in me; and 
unconsciously, as it were, the patriotic 
passion that had consecrated my boyhood 
rose up and swore allegiance to this mas- 
ter example of a civic life. There was my 
sense and feeling of his magnetic power; 
there was, perhaps, the temperamental 
sympathy that has since made me, as you 
know, a past-master in heresies ; but, more 
than this, there was the craving of the 
human heart for a hving personality from 
which to draw strength in its faith. Of 
all the leaders of that time he alone was 
to me a living person ; only from him did 
I have that touch which is, from genera- 
tion to generation, the laying on of the 
hands of hfe. 

I came to feel him yet more near. I met 
him once or twice. The first time was in 
my brother's store. He spent two sum- 
mers at Beverly, during which I was for 
the most part away. He used to come up 
for his mail, and would step into the store 



8 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

to read his letters and talk for an hour or 
so every morning ; and so he became for 
us, in away, a household memory ; and he 
left two mementoes of himself, illustrating 
two sides of his nature, — one, a portrait 
of John Brown ; the other, a Greek terra- 
cotta mask of a woman 's face , from Charles 
Sumner's colle6lion, as beautiful an ex- 
ample as I ever saw. Sometimes a child — 
he spoke to all the children on the street 
— would come in for his autograph; and 
he wrote, as was his well-known custom, 
the words," Peace, if possible ; but justice 
at any rate." These are memories of his 
age. There was another Phillips, of whom 
I will speak later. This was the Phillips 
that I knew, — an old gray man, simple, 
kindly, serene; a gentleman in every line 
of his fine features, in every motion, in 
every fibre ; a type never to be forgotten 
by eyes that saw him. At a little distance, 
especially when he wore his great over- 
coat, he might have been taken for some 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 9 

old farmer. It was thus he looked at 
Arnold's le6lure when he spoke some 
after- words of truth about Emerson. In 
the streets of Boston, toward the end, he 
seemed a somewhat lonely figure, I used 
to think. I remember Nora Perry, the 
poetess, who knew him well, telling me 
of his meeting her once there and asking 
where she was going. "To see a friend,'' 
she replied. "Ah," he said, "you remind 
me of the Frenchman who received the 
same answer, and said, * Take me along. I 
never saw one. '"Phillips had friends, and 
I have known some of them who have 
enriched my impression of him as a per- 
sonality ; but in early life he had few, and 
a man, though he have many friends, may 
sometimes feel like that. 

Of course I do not mean to pronounce 
any eulogy on Wendell Phillips, or to re- 
view that career, — one of the most dra- 
matic in the annals of American biogra- 
phy, — though it tempts my pen. Others, 



lO WENDELL PHILLIPS 

whose lips are more skilled than mine 
in public encomium, will do that to-night 
before great audiences ; the present lead- 
ers of those causes which he championed 
at their birth will bring him praise ; the 
race to whom he devoted his prime, chief 
mourner at his grave, will deck the sod 
with flowers and cover his memory with 
gratitude. We are but a little band of 
friends gathered together to consider the 
lesson of his life. I desire, as the leader 
of our thoughts, to regard him independ- 
ently of the transitory events and mea- 
sures of his career, and rather to set forth 
what was fundamental in that spirit, of 
which his a6ls and words were merely 
the mortal phenomena. 

That spirit, most stri6lly stated, was 
the soul of New England. He was a New 
Englander, a Bostonian, and yet more 
narrowly, a Boston Puritan. I refer not 
so much to his birth, as to his substance. 
The pivotal points of human history seem 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 11 

often ridiculously small. You remember 
Lowell's fine sentence: "On a map of 
the world you may cover Judea with 
your thumb, Athens with a finger-tip; 
but they still lord it in the thought and 
a6lion of every civilized man/' The Puri- 
tan spirit is a similar phenomenon. It pre- 
sents the same union of intense localiza- 
tion with a world-wide sweep of principle. 
Wendell Phillips was that burning nu- 
cleus made a living soul, whose vibrations 
were sent through a people. Moral depth 
was the distinguishing trait of his nature; 
remorseless logic was the biting edge of 
his mind. He sent his roots so far down 
that they seemed to clasp the very rock of 
righteousness, and thereby he towered 
the more in the intellectual air of truth. 
You may know a Boston man by two traits 
— not that he has any exclusive owner- 
ship of them: he thinks he knows, and 
he thinks he is right. In a world prone to 
error men smile at such claims ; but what 



12 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

if by chance they should be well founded ? 
Wendell Phillips did know. Wendell Phil- 
lips was right. How did he achieve such 
an uncommon distinftion in a public man.^ 
Phillips believed in ideas. They were 
his stock in trade, his armory, his jewels, 
— what you will. To know them, to pre- 
sent them, to discuss them, to make them 
prevail, — that was his life-work. Other 
men profess to believe in ideas, but usu- 
ally with some qualification of expedi- 
ency, of opportunity, of compromise, and 
with a frequent disposition to rely on other 
agencies, — favor, money, force; but Phil- 
lips believed in ideas, rulers by their own 
nature, vi6lors in their own right, whose 
advance was as resistless as the motion 
of matter, inviolable as natural law, — the 
reign of what ought to be. Children of 
man's intelligence and man's conscience, 
ideas are born to the inheritance of the 
earth. This belief in the power of the un- 
aided idea to win was a cardinal point in 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 13 

his convi6lions. It was a corollary of his 
faith in the soundness of human nature : 
men can know truth; men can be per- 
suaded of it; and men — humanity — will 
not reje6l truth if once it be clear in their 
minds and hearts. 

The great enemy of ideas is institu- 
tions. Phillips drew in with his New Eng- 
land milk the temper of that stock which 
had dethroned a king. He breathed the 
same transcendental air as Emerson. His 
view of history was pra6lically that of 
the Revolutionary fathers, and, in its theo- 
retical part, that of his great contempora- 
ries. He had apprehended and thoroughly k 
mastered the conception of history as the 
unfolding of the soul of humanity. I nstitu-.^" 
tions are the successive cells of its habit- 
ancy, hke the chambered nautilus. 

" Build thee more stately mansions^ O my Soul! " 

The growth of the soul is a continual 
emergence, — a breaking of swaddling- 



14 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

bands, a casting away of outgrown and 
wornout clothes, a transgression of sa- 
cred limits, a rending of the veil of the 
temple, an earthquake-fall of the pillars 
of the state, a resurrection into higher 
forms, a revolution into ampler good, an 
ascent where the free spirit's foot rests ris- 
ing from the body of the dead past. Institu- 
tions are shells; as soon as they begin to be 
uncomfortable, as soon as the living body 
begins to feel their pressure, to be cabined 
and confined therein, the walls break ; the 
young oak explodes the old acorn. Phil- 
lips was fond of repeating Goethe's simile 
of the plant in the porcelain vase: "If the 
pot cannot hold the plant," he would say, 
" let it crack ! "Civilization laughs at insti- 
tutions. Order, in the sense of the fixity 
and permanence of what is, which society 
enjoins and old men love, is a defe6live 
conception of public well-being. It maybe 
heaven's first law, but heaven is a finished 
place. Change is the password of grow- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 15 

ing states. Order means acquiescence, 
content, a halt; persisted in, it means the 
atrophy of life, a living death; it is the 
abdication of progress. We were taught / 
that the divine discontent in our youthful 
breasts was the swelling of the buds of 
the soul ; so there is a divine discontent in 
the state, which is the motions of its di- 
vinity within brooding on times to come. 
Agitation is that part of our intelle6lual / 
life where vitality resides. There ideas are 
born, breed, and bring forth. Without in- 
cessant agitation of ideas, public free dis- 
cussion, the state is dead. Disorder, in- 
deed, is a disturbance of our peace, an in- 
terference with our business, a trouble; but 
that is its purpose — to trouble. Phillips, 
quoting Lord Holland, — for he liked to 
mask his wisdom in a distinguished name, 
— often said : " We are well aware that the 
privileges of the people, the rights of free 
discussion, and the spirit and letter of our 
popular institutions must render — and 



16 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

they are intended to render — the contin- 
uance of an extensive grievance, and of 
the dissatisfa6lion consequent thereupon, 
dangerous to the tranquillity of the coun- 
try, and ultimately subversive of the au- 
thority of the state." That is the principle 
which, applied generally, is the univer- 
sal charter of ideas, under whose freedom ^ 
they maintain that incessant crumbling of 
institutions which is the work of growing/ 
nations. 

\{, in Phillips's scheme, ideas are the 
agents and agitation the means, the end 
is justice. No word was so dear to him as 
justice. Every chord of his voice knew 
its music. It was a God of justice that old 
New England worshipped; and throne 
what creed you will in her later churches, 
the awful imprint of that ancient faith will 
never fade from the hearts of her old race. 
The sense of justice is the bed-rock of the 
Puritan soul. It was this that gave passion- 
ate convi6fion and iron edge to the little 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 1 J 

band of anti-slavery apostles with whom 
Phillips walked, pleaded, and preached 
through long years of hatred, contumely, 
and scorn. In the evening of his days that 
molten glowseemedtodissolve in a golden 
vision of a world where every man should 
have an equitable share in the goods of 
nature and the benefits of civilization, and 
he saw mankind converging thereto in 
many lands by many paths. 

I cannot fully state nor adequately re- 
view the particular ideas of Phillips in 
their number; but I will touch on one or 
two of the most elementary. He believed 
in the principle of human equality. He was 
intelle6f ually the child of that much de- 
rided but still extant document, the De- 
claration of Independence. Ideas are only 
truly alive when they are incarnated in 
some man. The Rights of Man were as 
the bone and muscle of Phillips, and the 
flood of human hope that once streamed 
from the Declaration, as a lighthouse 



l8 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

among the nations, made music in his 
blood and thrilled his nerves. He was, 
doubtless, sustained in his belief in human 
equality by his Christian convi6lions of 
the divine origin and immortal nature of 
man, and by his unshaken faith in that 
God who had made of one blood all the 
nations of the earth, and was a just God. 
In Christianity the line is so sharply drawn 
between all other creatures and man," a 
little lower than the angels," that such a 
conception of the unity of human nature 
is almost axiomatic. 

I shall not discuss the truth of the 
do6lrine ; but it lay at the roots of Phil- 
lips's faith in the people, which was his 
distinguishing trait as a master of public 
affairs. No hyperbole can overstate that 

^ faith. Phillips believed in ideas, but not 
in an intelle6lual class who are the pos- 
sessors and guardians of ideas, and by 
that fa6l trustees of the masses. He be- 

> lieved in ideas, not in the form of know- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS I9 

ledge, but in the form of wisdom. Know- 
ledge may belong to the brain of the ^ 
scholar, but wisdom is the breath of the-^ 
people. Knowledge is the idea, volatile and 
abstract, in the mind; but wisdom is the 
idea dipped in the dyer's vat of life. The ^ 
masses have political wisdom because the 
life of the people is the life of the state. 
An Italian boy, working out taxes on a 
Sicilian road, said to me once : *' The poor t^ 
pay with their bodies, Signore."! remem- 
bered it because the words were almost 
identical with Lowell's."! am impatient," 
he said at Birmingham, "of being told>-^ 
that property is entitled to exceptional 
consideration because it bears all the bur- 
dens of the state. It bears those, indeed, 
which can most easily be borne, but pov- 
erty pays with its person the chief ex- 
penses of war, pestilence, and famine." 
That boy is probably nowin Tripoli, "pay- 
ing with his person; "that is what I mean 
by the political idea dipped in the dyer's 



20 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

vat of life. ''Theories," said Phillips," are 
pleasing things, and seem to get rid of all 
difficulties so very easily. One must begin 
to abstra6l principles and study them.; But ^ 
wisdom consists in perceiving when hu- 
man nature and this perverse world ne- 
cessitate making exceptions to abstraft 
truths. /Any boy can see an abstradl prin- 
ciple. Only threescore years and ten can 
discern precisely when and where it is 
well, necessary, and right to make an ex- 
ception to it. That faculty is wisdom, all 
the rest is playing with counters. And this 
explains how the influx into politics of 
a shoal of college-boys, slenderly fur- 
nished with Greek and Latin," — they are 
still more slenderly furnished now, — 
" but steeped in marvellous and delightful 
ignorance of life and public affairs, is fill- 
ing the country with free-trade din." 

The depositary of this life-wisdom, in 
state affairs, is the masses. Municipal gov- 
ernment in America was, in Phillips's 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 21 

judgment, a failure ; but I cannot think he 
would have welcomed government by 
commission as a remedy, or have ever as- 
sented to that increasing tendency toward 
government by experts, which is observ- 
able among us. There is government busi- 
ness which should be condu6led by com- 
petent officials ; but government is not a 
business. It is amazing how government 
tends to localize itself in a class, which, 
temporarily dominant in the community 
under special circumstances, mistakes its 
interest and j udgment for that of the whole 
body, and desires to be recognized as the 
trustee of the others ; government by sol- 
diers, by lawyers, a business-man's gov- 
ernment, a banker's government,— what 
not? All are but instances of a part trying 
to swallow the whole. It is natural to mis- 
take one's own point of view for the cen- 
tre, hard to believe in the possibility of the 
antipodes where men walk, quite natu- 
rally, with their heads upside down. I re- 



22 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

member an English officer at Taormina, a 
man of cultivation, explaining to me with 
great cogency and sincerity the advan- 
tage of settling human disputes by war in- 
stead of by courts; it was the better way. 
It is a good point in a king, considered as 
the head of a government, that he is nei- 
ther a lawyer, nor a business-man, nor a 
banker, nor even an independent voter. I 
have no quarrel with independent voting ; 
but when a party of independent voters 
assumes to be the brain and conscience of 
the state, and thinks to control it by pos- 
sessing itself of the balance of power, like 
a clique in a Continental parliament, — and 
especially if it does this in the name of 
education or of any superiority residing in 
it, as if it were that remnant in whom was 
the safety of Israel, — it is an insolent chal- 
lenge to populargovernmentand breathes 
the spirit of the most bigoted autocracy. 
No. Least of all does it belong to the 
scholar to distrust the people; least of all 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 23 

to him whose stake in the country is not 
property, nor any personal holdings nor 
gain, but rather his share of human hope 
for the betterment of man's lot among all 
nations and in distant ages; least of all 
to him, the dreamer, to forget where and 
when and by whom the blows of the in- 
cessant Revolution, which is the rise of 
humanity, have been struck. 

"All revolutions," said Phillips, "come 
from below." Had he not seen k? Had he 
not been thrust out of the world's society, 
and found all that was organized and re- 
spe6lable in the state against him? — the 
more bitter the more high it stood .? He had 
with his own lips successively consigned 
to damnation the Church, the Constitution, 
and the Union because they were doing 
devil's work. " When I was absorbed into 
this great movement," he said," I remem- 
ber well that it found me a very proud man ; 
proud of the religious, proud of the civil, 
institutions of the country. Thirty years 



24 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

have not brought back the young pride 
nor renewed the young trust. I go out with 
no faith whatever in institutions." And the 
lesson he had learned in his own person, 
history repeated to him from her page. 
Always against the mighty, the proud, the 
comfortable, the human mass had surged 
up under the pressure of its wants and 
instin6ls in the growth of time. Power, 
in the end, was theirs: against noble or 
priest, against learning or wealth, power 
at last rested with them. ''Keep it," said 
Phillips; "you can never part with too 
little, you can never retain too much." 
Jealousy of power," eternal vigilance," is 
the first safeguard of a free state. The 
people parts with power only to find an 
oppressor in its holder. Tyranny is the 
^ first instin6l of power. It is an old maxim 
of state that power corrupts the hand that 
wields it." No man is good enough," said 
Lincoln, "to rule any other man." Jeal- 
ousy of power is of the essence of the 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 25 

American spirit, and drawn from its his- 
toric birth; it may slumber long, but it 
slumbers light; and to-day the land is full 
of its mutterings. 

How has it fared with the causes Phil- 
lips committed to the angry sea of public 
discussion and the stormy decision of the 
popular tribunal ? He fought in them all ; 
he responded to every appeal, at home, 
abroad. After the vi6lory over the arch- 
foe, slavery, others might sigh, like the 
good Edmund Quincy, with a feeling of 
glad rehef, " No more picnics, Wendell ;" 
but his hand in that grim conflict had so 
closed round the sword-hilt of speech that 
it could not loose its grip. He fought on, 
and his post was always ahead. There 
are those who thought him foolish, head- 
strong, erratic, fanatic, wrong; but when 
was he ever thought otherwise by his op- 
ponents, or by the indifferent, — men still 
unenlightened by the event .M make no 
apologies for him. Examine the record. 



u 



26 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

You can follow the trail of triumphant 
popular causes by the echoes of that sil- 
ver voice. Woman suffrage, labor, tem- 
perance, — these have made giant strides 
since he was laid to rest. Ireland has home 
rule at her door. Russia has the Duma. 
Capital punishment, indeed, still survives, 
but there has been great advance in the 
general attitude toward, and treatment 
of, the criminal and delinquent classes, 
though there has been occasionally a bar- 
baric return to the whipping-post, and to- 
day we hear again on all sides the blood- 
hound cry for the speedy trial and quick 
death of the murderer. The initiative, the 
referendum, and the recall, there can be 
no doubt, would have had Phillips's hearty 
cooperation and support. They are but the 
precipitation of his thought. The recall 
of the judges would not have dismayed 
him. He had recalled a judge. The recall 
of judges is Massachusetts do6frine as 
old as the state. It is effefted by the will 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 27 

of the governor, a61ing on a simple ad- 
dress of the legislature by a majority vote 
without other ground than the people's de- 
sire. Edward G. Loring was thus recalled, 
on the initiative of Phillips and others, for 
the reason that, although a6iing in a legal 
and official manner as federal commis- 
sioner under the Fugitive Slave Act, a 
*' slave-hunter" — as they called him — 
was unfit to be a Massachusetts judge. 
Phillips foretold, as did also Lowell in 
the Birmingham speech, the present con- 
fli6t with incorporated wealth. "The great 
question of the future,'' he said,'* is money 
against legislation. My friends, you and I 
shall be in our graves long before that bat- 
tle is ended ; and unless our children have 
more patience and courage than saved this 
country from slavery, republican institu- 
tions will go down before moneyed corpo- 
rations. The corporations of America mean^ 
to govern; and unless some power more 
radical than ordinary politics is found, will 



28 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

govern inevitably. The only hope of any 
effe6lual grapple with the danger lies in 
rousing the masses whose interests lie 
permanently in the opposite dire6lion/' 
Take up the record where you will, if you 
deny merit to Phillips in his latter-day 
instindls and pleadings, you must deny 
wisdom to the a6lual movement of the 
last thirty years and the plain current of 
American democratic development at the 
present day. 

If there has been recession anywhere, 
it is in the matter which lay nearest to Phil- 
lips's heart, — negro rights, race equality, 
and in general in the attitude of the public 
mind toward the principle of an integral 
humanity, one and the same in all men, 
which is found in the Declaration. The 
change of view, which I think no one can 
doubt, is not peculiar to us, but is world- 
wide, and is consequent on the spread 
of European dominion over the so-called 
backward peoples of Asia and Africa. The 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 29 

sins of a nation lie close to its virtues. The 
strength of our age is commerce, resting 
on industry. It is a thing of vast benefi- 
cence, and loads with blessings those na- 
tions whom it benefits ; but like all strength 
it has its temptations. Our temptation is to 
exploit the backward nations, and possess 
ourselves of their lands. If they escape the 
destru6lion that overtook the Indian, it is 
because there are too many of them. The 
conqueror, in old times, when there was 
a surplus of subje61 populations, enslaved 
them. We take them into our tutelage. 
The idea of tutelage readily passes into a 
conception of our wards as permanently 
inferior,but economically useful. It breeds 
the notion of servile races. The question 
of human equality has broadened. It is no 
longer a question of a black skin, but of 
any skin except white ; so true is it that 
a prejudice against one race is a prejudice 
against all races, and will finally prove so. 
I am not going to dispose of the negro 



so WENDELL PHILLIPS 

question to-night; but I mean to state a 
few matters of what seems to me elemen- 
tary truth. 

I say nothing of the denial of negro 
rights by lynching. That is a mere bru- 
tality. We are shamed in the face of civ- 
ilized nations as no other of the group, 
except Russia, has been shamed for cen- 
turies; but though the impeachment of 
our humanity is patent, tragic, and terri- 
ble, I do not believe that the brutalities 
of recent years are a drop in the bucket 
in comparison with what the negro race 
suffered under slavery in old days. They 
are sporadic ; they are blazed upon by the 
pitiless publicity of all the world ; they are 
outlawed, and resemble a6ls of brigand- 
age. I note only the extension of lynch- 
ing to white men and the spread of the 
habit of burning negroes to Northern 
States. You cannot calmly watch a fire in 
your neighbor's house ; it will leap to your 
own roof. You cannot wink at crime in 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 31 

your neighbor's dooryard; it will soon be 
in your own. The denial of negro rights 
by the nullification of the constitutional 
amendments is a graver matter. I have 
only this to say, that no student of history 
can be surprised at a diminishing respe6l 
for a Constitution that does not maintain 
itself as the supreme law of the land hon- 
estly abided by. Phillips stated the true 
principle: "The proper time to maintain 
one's rights is when they are denied; the 
proper persons to maintain them are those 
to whom they are denied."! devoutly hope 
that the negroes will so grow in manhood 
as to be their own saviours in the ful- 
ness of time, as our own fathers long ago 
wrenched from the hands of unwilling 
masters the rights that are now our dear- 
est possession. 

I should have much to say of negro 
education, were there time. The princi- 
ple is plain. Demand the same schools 
for negroes as for white men. There is a 



y/ 



32 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

tendency to restri6l negro education to 
industrial pursuits. It is the same spirit 
which advocates vocational schools for 
the children of the laboring classes. It is 
no longer a question of the black serf, but 
of the economic animal of any color. I be- 
lieve in manual training for all children; 
I believe in vocational schools ; but these 
latter are, as it were, the professional 
schools of the workers, and should bear 
the same relation to a moral and mental 
training, preparatory to or associated with 
them , that professional schools bear to the 
college. The first thing to teach a child is 
that he has a soul; the first thing to give 
a boy is an outlook on a moral, intelle6l- 
ual,and aesthetic world. Not to endow him 
with that is to leave him without horizons, 
a human creature blind and deaf, centred 
in the work of his hands and in physical 
conditions, — an economic animal. In the 
educational tendencies to which I refer, 
there is too much of man as an economic 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 33 

animal. The negro is no more so than the 
white man. Give the negroes, then, the 
same schools as the whites ; give the sons 
of the laboring classes the same schools 
as all other children of the state, — citizen 
schools. 

Man is an economic animal, but he is 
not primarily that; and he should not be 
educated primarily with a view to that, 
but to his being a man. The workers 
should always be jealously on their guard 
against any principle of caste. The inter- 
ests of the negroes will finally be found 
to be permanently identical with those of 
the working class everywhere, and labor 
should never acquiesce in any social view 
or arrangement which contemplates the 
laboring mass of men with hands lifted 
and shoulders bowed to receive the bur- 
den from a higher class more fortunately 
endowed to be their masters. You can ac- 
knowledge your inferiority to others in 
acquirements, capacity , efficiency ; but you 



34 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

cannot acknowledge inferiority in your 
being. You may lay the humblest tasks 
upon yourself, as saints and sages besides 
Milton have done; but you yourself must 
lay them on. If our economic system neces- 
sarily embodies a principle of caste, why, 
then, as Phillips said, "let it crack! "Let 
it go the way of many another institution 
that once seemed all powerful and of the 
very substance of necessity, to the heap 
of old shards ! 

'■''For what avail 
The plow and sail" 

unless the man be free .^I deplore the tem- 
per which acquiesces in the conception of 
permanent servile classes in the state, ed- 
ucated to be such, and the spirit of def- 
erence thereto, on whatsoever ground it 
may be based. It is not by deference that 
men win their rights. It is not by denying 
their own share in the spiritual nature of 
man and their participation in the high 
heritage of civilization that men mount in 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 35 

that realm and possess themselves of that 
good. 

There is one other point. A race is 
judged, with regard to its capacity, like a 
poet, not by its normal and average pro- 
du6l, but by its best. That is the rule. I 
suppose that the most immortal oration of 
Wendell Phillips, as a formal produ6lion, 
is that onToussaint L'Ouverture. I can re- 
member the hour and the place when in 
my boyhood I discovered Shakspere, By- 
ron, Shelley, Carlyle, Scott, Tasso, Virgil, 
Homer ; but there are some names I seem 
always to have known. The Bible, Wash- 
ington, Whittier, Milton, William Tell, 
Algernon Sidney, Garibaldi, Toussaint 
L'Ouverture, mix their figures with the 
shadows of my very dawn of life. I sup- 
pose I owe Toussaint L'Ouverture to Phil- 
lips. The speech is a marvellous example 
of oratorical art, and will be treasured 
through generations by negroes as the 
first eulogy of a man of their race. No 



36 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

one who has read it can ever forget its 
peroration, when the orator, sinking to 
his close, like the sun setting in the sea, 
seemed to fill the earth with light, and 
touched with his glory the mountain-peaks 
of history, — summits of human achieve- 
ment, Phocion, Brutus, Hampden, La 
Fayette, Washington, John Brown, — and 
high overall poured his light onToussaint 
L'Ouverture; high over all, not in arms, 
letters, or arts, but in moral greatness, 
which all men agree is the supreme ex- 
cellence of man. 

There is one thing that latitude and 
longitude do not bound, nor geography, 
nor climate, nor ancestry, nor poverty, 
>/ nor ignorance, nor previous condition of 
barbarism, — one capacity, at least, com- 
mon to mankind, moral power. Who of 
us has not, at some time or other, stood 
amazed and reverent before some simple 
human a6l, among the humble, in which 
the soul shone forth, as if disapparelled 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 37 

of its poor belongings, in its own nature? 
I believe that the race which is thus capa- 
ble of moral power can scale all other 
heights. It may be that the negroes, con- 
sidered with a view to their social utility, 
like all other masses of men, are capable 
only of an economic ^rvice. That is the 
main task of mankind. But beware of clos- 
ing the gates of mercy on those young 
ambitions, those forward instin6ls, the 
prayers and struggles of the waking soul 
of a race ! Give the negroes a true univer- 
sity, — a white man's university. The trials 
and discouragements of genius are an old 
and sad story in our own annals. Think 
what the burden must be that rests on 
negro efforts. I say these things with no 
desire to trouble the waters, as indeed 
I have no right. I know that negro ed- 
ucation is in conscientious and devoted 
hands. But these were things dear to Phil- 
lips's heart; they are a part of the sacred 
heritage he entrusted to those who were 



38 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

touched by his spirit and should follow 
his leading. 

It is obvious that I regard negro rights 
as a part of a larger matter, gradually 
fusing with the attitude of public thought 
toward all race questions. The revolution- 
ary principle of human equality flows now 
in a world channel. I am more concerned 
with the future of the backward nations, 
and our part therein. Something might be 
said in behalf of the integrity of indigenous 
ideals by one who, like myself, knows no 
absolute truth, and looks on all institutions 
as human, — the house of life which gen- 
erations and races build for themselves 
out of their own hearts and thoughts for 
a temporary abiding place. But the notion 
of the universal integrity of the soul of 
humanity, one and the same in all races, 
involves that of their union in one civiliza- 
tion, since truth is universal. The truth of 
man is as universal as the truth of mat- 
ter, and, under present conditions of com- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 39 

mimication, must in the end draw the na- 
tions together. 

The recent advance of the backward 
nations is hardly realized by us. They 
have made more speed in progress rela- 
tively than ourselves. We have progressed 
in knowledge of the nature of matter, 
in the mechanic arts, and in economic 
organization, — things easily communi- 
cated and to be quickly appropriated. In 
certain matters, it is to be remembered, 
some of the backward nations have a 
greater past than ourselves, in art and in 
thought, for example. I myself regard 
America as a backward nation in her 
own group. We have had but one original 
thinker in the last generation, William 
James, and I had to go to Europe to find 
it out; they do not seem to know it yet 
in Boston. A brief conta6f with Continental 
thought and affairs is sufficient to reveal, 
not only the finer quality, variety, and 
potency of civilizing power there, but the 



40 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

great gap by which we fail of their real- 
ized advance in ideas, measures, and an- 
ticipations. There one feels the pulses of 
the world. I cannot overstate my sense of 
the degree in which we lag behind in all 
that concerns the world except trade. I 
feel the more regret, therefore, when I 
observe the weakening of our hold on 
the one great principle that has distin- 
guished us as a nation, — our sense of po- 
litical justice, in which we have stood at 
least equally with France and England in 
the van. America's title to glory among 
^ the nations is her service to human lib- 
erty. I can bear that we should fail, rela- 
tively, in art and letters, have little sense 
of beauty, or skill in man's highest wis- 
dom, philosophic thought, or in his high- 
est facuhy , imagination ; but I cannot bear 
that we should fail in justice. I cannot bear 
that we should tear the Declaration across, 
revoke our welcome to the poor of all the 
earth, tyrannize over weaker states, con- 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 41 

du6l our diplomacy on a basis of trade in- 
stead of right, or abate by a hair's breadth 
our standard of human respe6l for all 
mankind. I lament the acquiescence of the 
times in a general recreancy to our fa- y 
thers' principles. " The feet of the aveng- ^ 
ing hours are shod with wool/' said the 
old Greeks. In the end God takes his price. 
But I pray that America may yet long 
maintain at home and abroad that Decla- 
ration which at our birth lit the hopes of 
all the world. 

I have wearied you with long talking ; 
but my heart is in my words. It has be- 
come plain as I have been speaking that 
I have set forth some elements of the 
American ideal, and that at the heart of 
that ideal is a faith. Phillips embodied it. 
We all need a faith, however we may 
strive to be rationalistic, agnostic, and to 
move only on the sure ground of ascer- 
tained truth. Without faith we are with- 
out horizons, a line of march, something 



42 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

ahead. All great rallying cries are in the 
future. Faith is beyond us, — our better 
part ; it is the complement of the Ameri- 
can ideal, its atmosphere and heavenly 
sustenance. The faith of one age is the 
fa6l of the next ; and then how differently 
it looks ! The faft seems as if it had always 
been. When the vi61:or is crowned, his 
path to the goal looks as plain and straight 
as the king's highway. Who could miss 
that road ^ How simple was Phillips's ca- 
reer ! It was a case of the hour for the man 
as well as the man for the hour, from his 
first sally when the unknown youth of 
twenty-four climbed the platform of Fan- 
ueil Hall, and at the first blow threw his 
already triumphing opponent dead and 
forever dishonored on the field. How 
pra6lical he was ! Defeat and vi6lory alike 
were weapons in his hands. He had been 
preaching disunion for a quarter of a cen- 
tury when he stepped forth as the chief 
orator of the Union cause. He was capable 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 43 

of that great reversal. He welcomed all 
instruments, — yes, welcomed "dynamite 
and the dagger" in their place, while 
Harvard sat spell-bound at the rapt and 
daring defense of the world-proscribed 
cause by the lonely truth-teller. Do you 
wonder that the people loved their great 
tribune at the last? Boston to-day has seen 
from dawn to midnight such a commem- 
oration as the city has not witnessed in 
my time, — the people's tribute. Other re- 
cent centennials have been rather con- 
ventional affairs; but to-day the Boston 
pavements that he loved, as he said, from 
when his mother's hands held up his 
toddling steps, have waked their music, 
and every footfall has been a note in the 
thanksgiving psalm of the city for a son 
worthy of his birthplace. 

How simple it seems now! But we, — 
our causes are doubtful." We are but one 
or two," we say. Did crowds go with him .? 
"We shall be discredited. "Did he move 



y 



44 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

amid applause? "And then, the risks," 
we add. Did he run none? You need not 
fear that your shoulder to the wheel will 
greatly accelerate anything in this old 
world; a thousand elements of power must 
conjoin in any great forward and revo- 
lutionary change. The fate of the world 
speeds only when the horses of the god 
draw the car. It is impossible to lead life 
without taking risks. I know that much 
that I have said to-night is heavy with 
risk. The willingness to take risks is one 
gauge of faith. Risk is a part of God's 
game, alike for men and nations. You 
must look down the mouth of a revolver 
to learn how often it misses the mark. 
Poltroonery steadies the aim of the foe. 
Death is not the worst of life. Defeat is 
not the worst of failures. Not to have tried 
is the true failure. Above all, do not draw 
back because everything is not plain, and 
you may, perhaps, be mistaken. Obscurity 
is always the air of the present hour. "At 



WENDELL PHILLIPS 45 

the evening time," please God, "there 
shall be light." 

No great career opens before us. For 
us if in our daily lives we make one per- 
son a little happier every day,— and that 
is not hard to do if one attends to it, — it 
is enough ; but should the hour come to 
any one of us, and that rallying cry be 
heard from out the dim future, his place 
is in the ranks, though mere food for 
powder. I am speaking of the battlefields 
and heroes of peace, and of what may 
easily happen. For that soul which is one 
and the same in the rich and the poor, the 
wise and the ignorant, the good and the 
bad,— a moral power,— may answer to 
the divine prompting in one as in another. 
Men differ in place, honor, and influence, 
but there is one seamless garment of life 
for all. 

There is one lesson that blazes from 
Phillips's memory,— the principle of sac- 
rifice as an integral element in normal life. 



46 WENDELL PHILLIPS 

He gave all, — fortune, fame, friends. I am 
not thinking of that initial step. I am think- 
ing of his home. That plain New England 
house, that almost ascetic home, scantily 
furnished for simple needs, — a rich man's 
home, as wealth was then accounted in that 
community, — foregoing enjoyments, re- 
finements, luxuries, natural to the mas- 
ter's birth and tastes, in order that the un- 
fortunate might be less miserable, is the 
monument by which in my mind I remem- 
ber him: a life of daily sacrifice. This is, as 
it were, our baptismal night. I wish I might 
dip you in these spiritual waters. It is noth- 
ing that we are humble. The humblest life 
may be a life of sacrifice; and the poorer 
it is, generally, the greater is the sacri- 
fice. Light is the same in the sun and in 
the candle: 

" How far that little candle throws his beams I 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world." 



B 29 1912 



n 



